Earth System Science Center

Earth System Science Center

The recent slowdown in climate warming is due, at least in part, to natural oscillations in the climate, according to a team of climate scientists, who add that these oscillations represent variability internal to the climate system. They do not signal any slowdown in human-caused global warming.

In 1987, Eric Barron, then a newly hired associate professor at Penn State was head of the Earth System Science Center in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. Now, nearly 27 years later, Barron is returning to Penn State, and faculty and researchers continue the tradition of pioneering research.

Michael E. Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology and director of Penn State's Earth System Science Center, will receive the National Wildlife Federation's National Conservation Achievement Award for Science on Sept. 25.

Global warming, increasing greenhouse gases and melting ice sheets are among the predictions made by the Nobel-Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but comprehending the scientific assessments, their human impacts, and the possibilities for mitigation is not easy. Now, in a new book, Penn State climate scientists Michael E. Mann and Lee R. Kump digest the most recent IPCC reports into easily understood, sometimes amusing explanations and illustrations. "Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming" features all the graphs, images and eye-catching layout expected from international publisher DK Publishing, which specializes in popular illustrated reference books such as "The Way the Universe Works."

Researchers confirm that surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were warmer over the last 10 years than any time during the last 1,300 years, and, if the climate scientists include the somewhat controversial data derived from tree-ring records, the warming is anomalous for at least 1,700 years.

Global warming, increasing greenhouse gases and melting ice sheets are among the predictions made by the Nobel-Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but comprehending the scientific assessments, their human impacts, and the possibilities for mitigation is not easy. Now, in a new book, Penn State climate scientists Michael E. Mann and Lee R. Kump digest the most recent IPCC reports into easily understood, sometimes amusing explanations and illustrations.

They can't talk. They're not measurably intelligent. They can't even move on their own. Yet Katherine Freeman of Penn State University's geosciences department has been learning something from common marine algae.

"We're trying to look back in time," says Freeman, "to see if the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was higher when the temperature was higher." By understanding Earth's ancient atmosphere, scientists hope to predict the consequences of modern-day greenhouse gas emissions.

Fifty-five million years ago, during the Eocene epoch, Earth underwent a warming more pronounced than any other on record. The average global temperature rose by 1 to 4 degrees C. Palm trees and alligators flourished within the Arctic circle. Researchers point to a greenhouse effect as the cause of this warming—an excess of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not unlike the situation we may face in the coming century. But what could have caused such an imbalance so long before humans and their combustion engines?

On the way to the airport, the taxi driver asked why I was going to D.C. "For a discussion meeting on global warming," I answered.

"Oh, that's never going to happen," he said. I told him I was an expert, but he had read enough. He quoted Reader's Digest to me. "We don't have to worry about global warming," he said. "You're wasting your time."